Worst… Lineup… Ever

The Newark Star-Ledger is suggesting that last night’s Met lineup was their worst in team history:

Here’s what the Mets threw out on the field last night:

1. Cory Sullivan, CF (.227)
2. Luis Castillo, 2B (.300)
3. Fernando Tatis, 3B (.243)
4. Daniel Murphy, 1B (.252)
5. Jeff Francoeur, RF (.262)
6. Jeremy Reed, LF (.256)
7. Alex Cora, SS (.256)
8. Brian Schneider, C (.197)
9. Livan Hernandez, SP (.132)

According to this lineup analysis tool on Baseballmusings.com, last night’s Mets lineup would be expected to score 3.665 runs per game. That is not very good. But to call it the worst lineup in team history may be a bit extreme.

I don’t think that there’s a reasonable way to search for what is truly the “worst” lineup in the history of the Mets.  But within the confines of 5 minutes of playing around on Baseball-Reference.com, I found at least three lineups that both look worse than last night’s to my eye and perform worse using the model on that website. Note that I ignored the first seven years of the Mets existence because picking on a lineup from one of those teams is kind of like picking on a retarded person. But here’s what I came up with:

September 22, 1979:

September 29, 1982:

And then there’s the fall of 2003, which included Timo Perez, Roger Cedeno, and Jason Phillips batting third in different ballgames.  But possibly the worst lineup from that season was:

September 28, 2003:

I’m sure that there are lineups that the Mets have put out there that rate worse than these, but I can’t imaging them being much worse.  But, if anyone can find a Mets lineup that fares worse in Baseballmusings lineup analysis tool, I’d be happy to hear about it.

Bonus random fact: That game on 9/22/79 was the last start of Ed Kranepool’s career.

Another bonus random fact: Paid attendance for that game on 9/29/82 was 3,175 at Shea Stadium. 

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Multiple HRs

In case you’re keeping track, Robinson Cano and Jerry Hairston Jr. hit back-to-back home runs for the Yankees tonight.  This was the 12th time that the Yankees have hit back-to-back homers this season.

What about the Mets?

They’ve done it once – Daniel Murphy and Ramon Castro on May 2nd in Philadelphia.

In fact, the Mets have only hit 2 or more home runs IN A GAME 14 times this season.

Bonus Fact: Gary Sheffield leads the Mets with 10 home runs.  Nine New York Yankees have more home runs than Gary Sheffield.  They can (and do regularly) field an entire lineup where every one of their players has more home runs than anyone on the Mets. They did this as recently as Friday against the Red Sox.  In fact, its their most common lineup, which they’ve used 13 times this season:

C. Posada
1B. Teixeira
2B. Cano
3B. Rodriguez
SS. Jeter
LF. Damon
CF. Cabrera
RF. Swisher
DH. Matsui

Right now, it is not easy to be a Mets fan.

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Parnell’s Final Tally Last Night

57 (possibly 58) fastballs, 10 sliders.

In terms of pitch movement, here’s what Parnell looked like last night:

The clump in the top left are the fastballs (ranging in velocity from 88 to 98 MPH.  If some of those 88MPH pitches are changeups, that’s a pretty fast changeup and it may be confusing Pitch F/X, which called one of those pitches a changeup and one a “two seam fastball.”   Nonetheless Parnell threw 58 fast pitches with the same type of break on them.

In the bottom right of the plot are his 10 sliders which averaged 85MPH.

That makes it 84% fastballs on the night, higher than his fastball rate (79.4%) when pitching out of the bullpen this season.

Again, as we learned two posts ago on this blog, this is not a typical formula for success for a Major League starting pitcher.

And finally, here’s where his pitches landed relative to the strike zone:

Looks to me like only 2 of Parnell’s 10 sliders were in the strike zone (although batters swung at two of the sliders that were out of the zone). 

Unfortunately, last night’s performance only reinforces that this guy is an unfinished product who has made little progress with his pitches over the (now) full season he’s spent in the Major Leagues.  Maybe the Mets want this guy to figure things out himself at the Major League level, but they’d probably serve him better by providing him some coaching and let him work on his secondary pitches at AAA.

(Graphs generated again on Brooksbaseball.net)

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